Abstract

This paper deals with expressive speech synthesis in a limited domain restricted to conversations between humans and a computer on a given topic. Two different methods (unit selection and HMM-based speech synthesis) were employed to produce expressive synthetic speech, both with the same description of expressivity by so-called communicative functions. Such a discrete division is related to our limited domain and it is not intended to be a general solution for expressivity description. Resulting synthetic speech was presented to listeners within a web-based listening test to evaluate whether the expressivity is perceived as expected. The comparison of both methods is also shown.

Keywords

This research was supported by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic, project No. TA01011264 and by the grant of the University of West Bohemia, project No. SGS-2010-054. The access to the MetaCentrum computing facilities provided under the programme “Projects of Large Infrastructure for Research, Development, and Innovations” LM2010005 funded by the Ministry of Education, Youth, and Sports of the Czech Republic is highly appreciated.